


A Handsome and Generous People

by sanguinity



Series: sang's moreholmes [4]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century (cartoon), The Future Tales of Sherlock Holmes
Genre: ACD Canon References, Angst and Humor, Gen, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2015-06-11
Packaged: 2018-04-03 14:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4104862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Watson,” Holmes said, reaching up to clasp my wrist. </p><p>“I’m sorry, old chap,” I said, giving him my hand. “It’s only Wt’sn.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Handsome and Generous People

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gardnerhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/gifts).



> _The Future Tales of Sherlock Holmes / Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century_ was [a never-produced Filmation series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57KR_bhi6J0); the pilot was later used as a stand-alone two-parter within their space-western _Bravestarr._ Most everything you'll need is in the first ten-to-twelve minutes; by the time Marshall Bravestarr shows up to ask for help you're pretty much set.
> 
> Or, if you prefer a textual recap: During the fight with Moriarty at Reichenbach, with Watson too far away to give aid, Holmes is the one who falls. On the way down, he passes through a timewarp and into an 1890s-meets-the-1980s 23rd-century London. Holmes immediately meets Dr. Wt'sn, a green-skinned alien physician from a planet in the Rigel system, and the two get on well enough to solve cases together. Also, Holmes can shoot lightning from his fingers now. (I dunno, it's a falling-through-a-timewarp thing?)
> 
> But time warps, lightning bolts, and digital clocks aside, this is simply a story about being the wrong Watson.
> 
> Many thanks to grrlpup and language-escapes for their speedy and sticking-to-their-guns beta work. I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude for their efforts. :-)

The ambush Holmes and I walked into that night was ten on two. In the ordinary course of things, that wouldn’t be interesting odds, not when the two consists of me with my Rigellian strength and Holmes with his Palpatine touch, but even the lowest vermin of London can get lucky, and on that night, in that alley, they did. Holmes and I were fighting back-to-back, as is only sensible, when I heard my friend grunt as he caught an unexpected blow. More worryingly, the crackling of his electricity died away.

“Holmes?” I called, too occupied with my own opponents to turn and look. I heard the quiet thud of a body hitting the ground, and felt cool air at my back. _“Holmes!”_ I repeated, picking up one of the bruisers in front of me and bodily throwing him at another.

The only reply was from one of the vandals that Holmes had been facing. _“Finally,”_ the brute growled. When I turned, I was not quick enough to stop him from planting a boot in my friend’s gut, but the man did not get the chance to repeat it.

Holmes made no sound in response to the kick, not even a hitch in his breathing.

It required longer than I preferred to dispatch the remainder of our assailants. My only comfort during that fight was that in my rage, I was keeping them far too busy with me for them to be able to vent any more of their displeasure on Holmes.

My medical scanner, unfortunately, became a casualty of the fight, and so when Holmes finally began to rouse, I was kneeling beside him and assessing his condition by the old-fashioned method, with my fingers at his neck.

“Watson,” he said, reaching up to clasp my wrist.

The error told me a great deal about his condition. “I’m sorry, old chap,” I told him, giving him my hand and continuing to count. “It’s only Wt’sn.”

He didn’t quite suppress his grimace, but rallied from the error more quickly than I expected. “Nonsense. There’s nothing ‘only’ about it,” he asserted, patting my hand companionably.

“And you’re very kind to say so,” I replied. “Now let me see your eyes.” Careful not to move his head or neck, I peeled back one of his eyelids with my thumb.

He jerked away, and I tried not to sigh. Humans were so distressingly fragile, and this one in particular would be damned before he would admit it. “Holmes,” I warned him.

“I’m all right, Wt’sn,” he insisted, trying to push my hand away. His Rigellian accent on my name was as impeccable as ever.

I snorted. “You called me Watson,” I reminded him, willing to play dirty if it kept him from hurting himself further. “You’ll forgive me for believing otherwise.”

He opened both eyes to glare at me, giving me the clear view I needed of his pupils. Both the same size, thank all the gods that watch over consulting detectives, and both responding to the light in perfect unison, too.

He groaned, realising he had been manipulated. He closed his eyes and lay back again. “Fine, have your way with me, if you insist on being tiresome about it.”

He was in severe pain if he was acceding, however gracelessly, to my examination. “Such a charming invitation,” I chided him, palpating his abdomen and watching his face closely for any hint of him stifling a flinch. He was one of the worst patients I had ever known, and I would not put it past him to attempt to hide an injury from me. “No wonder you bring all the boys, girls, and non-binary individuals to the door.”

He made a noise of amusement, but didn’t open his eyes. “I’m afraid you’ve confused me with yourself again.”

“Very likely. Although it’s difficult for me to see how I could forget which of us is the handsome one,” I replied, “with your face right in front of me.”

He tried to laugh, but jerked in pain instead. “We can’t all be lucky enough to be Rigellian,” he finally said, when he had brought himself under enough control to speak again.

I frowned, and girded myself for our usual battle over whether he should go to hospital, or whether I alone would be sufficient to his needs.

Holmes finally agreed to the hospital, but only because I had consulting privileges there and would be able to bypass triage to treat him myself, provided the equipment was not already in use. His haste to get back to a case was an admirable trait overall—that many more lives saved, that much more suffering prevented—but as his friend and a medical professional, it was a frustrating thing to watch. Fortunately, in this particular instance even he was forced to agree that he would be faster with a delay for treatment.

For the remainder of the case, I put aside the memory of his momentary slip in the alleyway: there were, after all, other lives at stake. But after Agent Holmes and Chief Inspector Lestrade took charge of our villains, and we ourselves had returned to our shared rooms so that Holmes could sleep off the exertions of the case, I found myself unable to settle into my usual sense of accomplishment over a case well-resolved. I paced our sitting room, turning over in my mind Holmes’ injuries, and the way he had murmured _Watson._

Three years it had been, since he had fallen three-hundred-odd years into the future and crashed through the roof of a cab right in front of me. Three years, and if I was any judge of it, he grieved his old friend Dr Watson no less than when he had first arrived.

 

By the time he woke for more than a few minutes, a full two days later, I had made up my mind. We had already spent the latter part of 2249 and well into 2250 reviewing the current research into time warps before Holmes had given it up for a waste of time. Having kept up with the research since, I had no real expectation that a fresh review would yield any new hope. Instead, I planned a second avenue of approach.

I waited to broach it until Holmes had finished his breakfast and settled in over his papers with his pipe. I am sad to say that Marshall Bravestarr kept Holmes well-supplied in tobacco in gratitude for Holmes’ assistance in recovering the boy Fleeter.

“If you wish to ruin both our mornings by sitting there and glowering at me, then please do so, old chap,” Holmes said, not looking up from his paper.

“You know that’s not what Marshall Bravestarr intended, when he made you that gift.” I had not meant to say anything, but it was troubling to watch him willfully and repeatedly damaging himself. There were limits to what modern medicine could achieve, after all.

“As if you give two jots for the good Marshall’s religion,” he scoffed. “But we both know it’s not the tobacco that’s troubling you this morning, you were a bear all through breakfast.”

I sighed. He was correct, as usual: I had been distracting myself from the matter at hand.

“I wish to ask an indulgence, Holmes.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “With your permission, I would like to read the stories.”

He peered at me a moment, startled, before returning his eyes to his paper. As I expected, he did not ask me whose stories I wanted to read. “I understood that you already had. Your every reaction positively screamed it, when we first met.”

“When I was a young man, newly arrived in London, yes, but not since coming to room with you.”

He made an irritated noise. “I’m cursed by romantics.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “If my company is so unpleasant, Holmes, you need only find new lodgings. I am no longer the only person you know in London.”

He glanced at me. “I don’t think we need go quite that far.”

I smiled. Two weeks to the day after I had first met him, he had appeared on the doorstep of my squalid rented room, carrying a half-empty carpetbag and fuming about how he refused to live in that museum one day longer. It seemed that he had been driven beyond endurance by anthropologists, who chided him for his desire to embrace the marvels of the twenty-third century, and curators, who nagged him about chairs on which he must not sit.

He must have had reasons of his own for not appealing to his family for assistance, but I did not need to know what they were. I drew him inside by the elbow, and offered up my bedsit as a refuge. “Such as it is,” I apologised, “and for as long as we can keep the landlord from noticing.”

“You’re very kind, but when we first met, I could not help but notice that my arrival interrupted your search for lodgings. Perhaps if we throw in together, you will have better success?”

I had liked him immediately when we met, and we had got on well during that first case. I had even attempted re-reading _A Study in Scarlet_ , before being brought to a halt by the sensation that I was taking a liberty with a man I barely knew, underlined by my refreshed memory of what a terrible novel it was. The imp in me could not resist: I told him about a place that I had an eye on, one that I thought would suit us right down to the ground.

Today, I blush at myself for making the joke: I had not realised how deep his feelings for Dr Watson ran, or I would never have implied the parallel. Holmes, however, had only raised an eyebrow at me.

“Watson was a terrible liar,” he said. “You’ll be comforted to know I have never once been tempted to poison a fellow lodger.”

From that moment, our pact of friendship was sealed.

Again Holmes attempted to return his attention to his papers. “You may do as you like with the stories. He published them for anyone to read for the price of a sixpence, and they’re not worth even that much now.”

It was grudging permission, but I had not hoped for better.

I was shuffling my notes, deciding where to begin, when I marked that he was glaring at me from his side of the room. Ordinarily I ignored him when he behaved so, but I figured I owed him whatever answers he pleased. “Yes, Holmes?”

 _“Why_ do you want to read the stories? I cannot figure it. You already know Watson was an incorrigible liar. You’ve read the one with the snake, haven’t you? What more proof do you need? Furthermore, you have me at your disposal, you could simply ask what you wish to know. It’s not as if there are any client confidences left to keep at this late date.” He continued to scowl at me, as if I was being abstruse in a deliberate effort to annoy him. “Is it because I called you ‘Watson’ the other day? You cannot possibly hold that against me, you’re a doctor. I was disorientated, and furthermore, I’ve never given you any reason to believe that you’re not as good a man as he was.”

The last comment was perhaps more revealing than he realised, but I was already aware of his care to ensure that I knew that he valued me for myself, not merely as a convenient replacement for his old companion. Unfortunately, he was punctilious about it in a way that suggested that I was, to at least some extent, a stopgap for Dr Watson’s absence. The comparison had never particularly bothered me, but I gathered it bothered him.

“So far as it goes, Holmes, you’re quite correct. I don’t wish to know about the cases. I wish to know what Dr Watson knew. We’ve all but given up on the possibility of finding another time warp to send you back. I wish to know if we’ve done so prematurely.” As I expected, his glare became more severe. If I had not been Rigellian, made of far stouter stuff than he was, I might have been intimidated by it. “He did, after all, write of your return.”

“Doctor Watson,” Holmes enunciated carefully, as if the problem was in my comprehension and not his obstinacy, _“was a liar.”_

“The dates—” I began.

“His dates are a disgrace. Always have been. He was forever combining cases to make a third. The dates, the clues, the logic— all casualties thereof.”

“You fell in 1893?” I asked, consulting my notes. I had not re-read the stories themselves, not without his permission, but I had done some preliminary research while Holmes slept. “Dr Watson wrote it was 1891.”

I had not meant that to be a telling fact—1891 had no particular meaning according to my research—but Holmes’ eyes went slightly unfocused, before he shook his head. “Of course he did,” he said, more to himself than me. “He always was a sentimental fool.” There was a sorrow in his words that I affected not to notice.

I cleared my throat. “There was one case in particular…” It was impossible to know what summary he would recognise, which details were the true ones, and which the false. “A failed plot to assassinate a deposed dictator, or other such powerful person. One of the assassins had been murdered—which is why you had been called in to investigate—and another was kidnapped by the dictator himself.”

He made a disgusted noise. “I was called in because the assassin’s alibi had backfired spectacularly. We only learned about the murder later.”

That tallied well with the summaries I had read. “What year?”

Holmes did not hesitate. “March of 1892.”

“In 1908 Dr Watson published a case of that description including the detail you just gave me, set in March of 1892, titled ‘Wisteria Lodge.’” When Holmes seemed unimpressed, I added, “He was roundly criticised for his choice of date: 1892 was during the period that you were allegedly missing. However, he never corrected it, as he did with many of his other errors.”

Holmes considered me. “And you think this means something, that he forgot the lies he had already established and for once published something true.”

“No,” I told him. “I wish to _discover_ if it did. If anyone knows if you ever made it back, Holmes, it would be Dr Watson. And if he knew you made it back, he might have some hints for us about how to proceed.”

Holmes’ expression was as hard as stone, and I belatedly realised that this line of inquiry might turn out to be a cruelty instead of kindness. He had attempted to find contentment in the twenty-third century, and I was upturning whatever progress he had made.

Still, when in distress, he had whispered _Watson._

“For three hundred and fifty years,” Holmes said, “the general public has been reading those stories. Quite a lot of people, in fact, many of them obsessed. Maybe even a few clever people talented at puzzles, although with the degree of romance Watson put in them, it would surprise me if there were very many. And you wish to ascertain whether there’s some kind of _cipher_ in those stories. A cipher that in three-hundred and fifty years, no one has noticed.”

Put like that, it sounded absurd.

He held out his hand. “Give them to me. If Dr Watson left a message in there, it was for me, and you’ll never find it.”

Reluctantly, I handed over my copy of the _Complete Adventures._ It was a cloth-bound, ink-and-paper volume—he had been correct to charge me with romanticism—sadly marked from my years knocking around London and its environs. I had never gotten much beyond the first two novels myself; I mostly kept it as a memento of the wonder of a storybook planet made real. To my knowledge, Holmes had never once looked at it in the three years since his arrival.

He opened the volume, found the table of contents, and ran his finger down the page. “Cardboard Box, Yellow Face, Stockbroker’s Clerk,” he murmured. “He was working on ‘Gloria Scott’ when I fell.” If Holmes felt any emotion about that, it was unreadable on his face. He efficiently sought through the book for the page he wanted, and settled back in his chair to read.

I was too tense to leave him to it; I wanted to be nearby, in case he needed me. His expression as he read was aloof, as clinical as if he had been analysing shipping manifests. No, that was a lie: he did not bother to guard himself with shipping manifests. If one cared to watch him read such things, one might see boredom, irritation, or the moment a salient fact caught his eye. Holmes evidenced no such responses to Dr Watson’s words, nor any other reaction that I could recognise. Occasionally his fingers would twitch at something on the page, and that was all.

Conscious of how closely he was guarding himself, I tried to busy myself with my own notes, but it was a fool’s errand. If three hundred and fifty years of scholarship had failed to turn up any credible leads in Dr Watson’s stories, who was I to think that I could contribute? Holmes at least had known the man.

Enough time had passed that I had just begun to wonder if I should try pressing food or drink on him, when I noted that Holmes was no longer reading impassively. As I watched, he rapidly turned a few pages forward and then back again, comparing passages. He scowled at whatever he had found.

“Holmes?” I ventured.

He glanced in my direction, but was too distracted to look at me properly. He squinted hard at the wall beyond me, considering whatever he had just read. I waited.

“I’m going out,” he announced, shutting the book decisively. His tone made it clear he wanted no company. He grabbed his hat and cape, and was gone before I could ask where.

 

For six days, I only saw glimpses of him as he came and went from our rooms. Sometimes his hat and cape were there when I returned from the hospital; sometimes they were not. Once I walked in to find the miasma of his tobacco thick in the sitting room: he had spent some time in the flat that day, thinking, but had already left again by the time I returned. I took to leaving simple meals out for him where he would see them as he came and went; occasionally I found them disturbed. When we did cross paths, he showed me the distracted civility he often employed to minimise other people’s interactions with him.

The third morning during that week of mysterious comings and goings, I was having breakfast by myself when he emerged from his room, apparently newly risen and already on his way out. He snatched my toast from the rack on his way to the door with a murmured word of thanks.

“Holmes,” I called as he passed, “if I can be of assistance, you need only tell me how.”

He stopped, and for the first time in days, he looked at me properly. After a moment, he smiled. “Of course, Wt’sn,” he said. “I shall call you directly if I need you.” Then he was out the door, and with the exception of my purloined toast, it was as if he had never been there.

The evening of the sixth day I was reading in my chair when I heard Holmes’ step on the stairs. Previously, his footfalls had been quick and light, the tread of an industrious man with someplace to be, but this evening his step was slower. Worried at what it might portend, I met him at the door.

I was relieved to find that nothing was obviously amiss with the man, despite his sombre demeanour. He carried an old tin box in both hands, eschewing the handle attached to the lid. Indeed, the handle looked as if it might fail if he tried it.

He gave me a fatigued smile. “Excellent, you’re here.”

I stood aside to let him by. “Is that…?”

“Either John Watson’s old despatch box, or a very cruel prank played by someone who knew far too much about both of us. It’s been a merry chase, tracking it down.”

“The Cox and Company despatch box,” I whispered, reverent. My researches had been full of speculation about it, where it might be, and whether it existed at all.

Holmes sighed. “One of these days you’ll believe me when I tell you that John Watson was a liar. Cox and Company, whoever they are, had no part in it.”

“How did you find it?”

“The Musgrave Ritual. First new story he wrote after I fell, from what I can tell. Allegedly a case I solved alone before I met him, but he made it up from whole cloth. Ridiculous, transparent thing about an obvious treasure map that everyone somehow failed to identify as a treasure map. I didn’t recognise a word of it.” He had set the tin box on the table, but didn’t remove his hands from it. “Well, I say I didn’t recognise a word of it, obviously I did. I thought I was going mad those first few days, chasing phantasms. I have to guard against over interpreting the data, Wt’sn, and I was sure I was doing just that, all wishful thinking, no substance. It might not have meant a thing, just him reminiscing. Grieving.” His thumb traced one of the scratches on the box. “Having a private joke with… well, nobody, really. The abominable Mrs Ricoletti, for god’s sake!” For a moment, he looked as if he was about to explain who the abominable Mrs Ricoletti was, but he shook his head. “And then the box _wasn’t there._ John left it in the most staid, most solid institution he could find, but a clerk had moved it along the way. I spent four days in interviews and records archives, trying to discover where. And here it is,” he finished quietly.

“I am exceedingly happy for you,” I said, patting his shoulder. I had not failed to note Holmes’ switch from ‘Watson’ to ‘John.’ “You are to be congratulated. For more than three centuries people have been trying to find that despatch box, and no one has. Now I’ll just leave you to it. There were some things I needed to attend to this evening—”

“Wt’sn,” he interrupted me, recognising my attempt at a graceful exit. He still hadn’t moved his hands from the tin box. “I would be appreciative if you stayed. I expect that tonight, I’ll want a friend rather more than solitude.” There was a vulnerability in his face that I could never recall him having allowed me to see before.

I swallowed, mindful of the honour he did me. “Of course,” I assured him, suddenly gruff. I patted his shoulder again. “Of course, old chap, I’ll just be over here if you need me.” I indicated my chair, and he nodded.

I settled myself in my chair, and he turned himself to the task of how to open John Watson’s despatch box.

I swear that I did not watch him—much—but I could not help but be aware of his progress. He didn’t bother with finesse, but pried the thing open with our fire iron. I was terrified for him that it had all gone to dust and mouse nests, but from where I sat, the contents seemed largely intact. There was a bundle of what seemed to be letters, which Holmes placed aside as gingerly as a bomb. There were also many loose documents, as well as flotsam I could not recognise at that distance. Dead leaves, perhaps.

“Wt’sn,” Holmes finally said. He was the very picture of misery.

I gave over pretending to read and joined him. The mysterious flotsam had in fact included dead leaves; they lay alongside other scraps of seeming trash, all arrayed across the table along with the loose documents. To my eye, there was no sense in any of it, but it was very much like the collections that Holmes often accumulated during a case.

I put my hand on his shoulder, offering what comfort I could. “What is it?”

He shook his head. He had not touched the bundle of letters further, I noted, beyond removing them from the box. “Remind me to never doubt John Watson again.”

I tightened my grip on his shoulder. I didn’t try for words: if he found his faith in his friend wanting, I imagined there was little I could say that would turn him from that belief. “Tell me what I’m looking at, old chap.”

He touched one of the dead leaves. “You recognise that, surely?”

I wasn’t certain. “It’s very like what we saw in Moriarty’s lair.”

“From Moriarty’s lair itself,” Holmes confirmed. “There’s enough physical evidence here that I could have found his hideaway. John wouldn’t have been able to do it—he didn’t do it, we know that—but this,” with a sweep of his hand, he indicated the collection, “this is very like him. He could never puzzle the pieces together, but he had a talent for recognising the telling detail when he saw it. Couldn’t tell you why it was telling, couldn’t sort the telling details from the useless ones, but I would send him out to investigate, and he would very reliably come back with the key to the case. It used to frustrate me immeasurably that I couldn’t systematise what he was intuiting. I improved considerably in the attempt, mind you, but… Well. I was better, when I had him beside me to point out what I missed.”

It was an impressive compliment. I knew how good Holmes was without John Watson. “You must have made a formidable team.”

“We did.” Then he seemed to remember who he was talking to, and he patted my hand where it lay on his shoulder. “Not that you’ve ever seen me work alone. You have your points, as well.”

“I’m happy to assist,” I told him, mostly to put an end to that line of conversation. I did not need his reassurance. He squeezed my hand once.

However, he seemed reluctant to go on. “So Dr Watson was investigating Moriarty,” I prompted.

“And got closer than he realised. Certainly closer than Moriarty realised. Moriarty was already asleep for John to get this close and yet live long enough to write all of those.” Holmes gestured at his chair, where my volume of the _Complete Adventures_ still sat from when he had abandoned it. “I never thought I’d be relieved to know John had published yet another story about me, let alone that he had published that many.”

“He lived a long life, if the publication dates are anything to go by.”

His shoulder tensed under my hand. “Yes, a long life. Thinking I was alive.” Holmes snarled in frustration, and I started. “Alive and had abandoned him!”

“Surely not.” It was unthinkable.

“Oh, _look_ at it, Wt’sn! He investigated Moriarty on his own, of course he did, he wasn’t about to let me go unavenged. And at some point he figured out I was alive, or he suspected it—watching Moriarty, perhaps, who knew I was alive and was acting accordingly. And so John tried to get his evidence to me. A damned good attempt, too. He didn’t risk a cipher, Moriarty is a mathematician, better at ciphers than I am, and far better than John ever was. That entire treasure map of John’s, it was all things only I would understand. Private jokes, double entendres, stories about his childhood! Not _my_ childhood, _his!_ No other man alive, no, not even Mycroft, would have been able to follow that trail!” I ached for Holmes. It had been a very intimate statement of faith on Dr Watson’s part, and must have been excruciating to follow. “And what did I do? I ignored it for three years!”

“Because he had been dead for centuries,” I reminded him. “It couldn’t possibly have mattered, at this late date. If you had been in 1893 when he published that story, you would have behaved differently.”

“Would I?” He ripped himself out from under my hand and stalked across the sitting room. Four angry strides to one wall, before turning and making his way back to the other. “I think you underestimate my capacity to—” He cut himself off abruptly, one hand over his mouth, trying to compose himself.

“You said he chose as staid and solid and institution as he could find. If he thought you were merely in hiding, he wouldn’t have chosen a place with walls and doors and guards, someplace where you risked being trapped.”

“He could not possibly have known about the time warp,” Holmes snapped.

“Moriarty did.”

“John was not Moriarty!”

I sighed. I regretted the necessity, but sometimes medicine required one to be seemingly cruel. “Not ten minutes ago, you asked me to remind you to never again doubt John Watson. I am reminding you now.” Holmes made no response. “Read the letters, Holmes. They cannot possibly be worse than what you’ve been thinking this past hour.”

His response to that was to stride past me to his room, shutting the door with enough force to make the papers on the table flutter. I was not particularly surprised, for as cool as he liked to pretend to be, he did not deal well with making errors. And he was very much in error, I thought, although it was not the error he rebuked himself for.

I gathered the loose items on the table and replaced them in Dr Watson’s despatch box, where they would be safe from further fits of temper. The letters, however, I left where they were.

Holmes did not emerge for the remainder of the evening. When I passed his door on the way to my own, I paused. “You are theorising ahead of the facts,” I said, pitched loud enough to carry through the door, but not enough to wake him if he had managed to sleep. There was no response from him, but I had expected none.

I left my own door off its latch, but heard nothing further of him that night.

When I came out the next morning, Holmes’ door was still closed, but Dr Watson’s letters were gone from the table. I proceeded to make breakfast, enough for two, although I had no real hopes of Holmes joining me.

To my surprise, he did. He was clean-shaven and fully dressed, perhaps in compensation for how exhausted and drawn he looked.

“I wish to apologise for my outburst last night,” he said, taking his seat.

“Think nothing of it.” I buttered a slice of toast and put it at his place, before turning back for the eggs. His one and my two were just ready; he had timed his emergence from his room perfectly.

He stared at that lonely slice of toast for far longer than it deserved, while I put the eggs into their cups and poured the tea. “Rigellians are a very handsome and generous people,” he finally said, in an echo of his first deduction to me. He had given it his best effort, but I could hear the emotion thickening his voice.

I snorted. And he called his friend a sentimental fool. “The best in the galaxy,” I agreed. “Eat up, before it gets cold.”

 

By noon, Holmes was once again working his way through Dr Watson’s stories, with the grim expression of a man doing penance. I thought it was entirely too soon to throw himself back into it, given the maelstrom of the evening before, but knew better than to say anything to him.

Nevertheless, when Agent Holmes arrived at the door later that afternoon, I met her with an impassioned, “Thank the gods!” And turning to my friend, “Get a move on, Holmes, there’s been a murder!”

Both the older and younger Holmes stared at me in frank astonishment. I felt myself blush bright green.

“You’ve been spending too much time with my uncle,” Agent Holmes said, not bothering to hide her laughter.

“Second time in a week he’s confused himself with me,” my friend agreed. “You need to get out more, old chap.” But he put the book aside, and pressed my arm as he passed me on his way to his cloak.

It took Holmes the better part of a year to finish reading the stories. He put them aside whenever he had a case, which I thought showed a healthy perspective, given that the stories had waited centuries for him, but the people who came to him for his assistance could not. Given that he sometimes had four cases on at a time, there were lulls as long as a month during which my battered copy of the _Complete Adventures_ sat untouched _._ But as time allowed, he returned to it diligently. 

Unlike that first day, he ceased guarding his reactions from me, although I noted that his old friend had once again become ‘Watson.’ It was painful to watch Holmes read ‘The Final Problem,’ but ‘The Empty House’ was worse: the only time I saw him take a voluntary recess from his progression through the stories was in the wake of whatever Dr Watson had to say about Holmes’ possibly fictional return. On the occasion of that story, Holmes engaged in a protracted and frankly dangerous set of experiments testing the extent of his electrical talents, and once again I greeted Agent Holmes at the door with inappropriate enthusiasm. But the endeavour was not all woe and angst, either: despite my fears that ‘The Dying Detective’ would reignite charges of Dr Watson’s mendacity, Holmes snickered from one end to the other like a schoolboy. And on two occasions, moved by some unknown sentiment, Holmes honoured me with the unexpurgated version of a case, his affection for his old companion clear in every word.

However, as Holmes came nearer to the back of the volume, and the cases he recognised grew farther between, irritation and frustration became the dominant theme. One afternoon he bolted from his chair after only minutes, agitated at something Dr Watson had written.

I watched him pace for a few moments, but he did not settle. “What is it, Holmes?”

“He claimed that he was only— He likened himself to my _cocaine!”_

“What year?” I read only the passages he shared with me, and no others: it was clear that on occasion Holmes found the stories almost unbearably intimate, and if he could have his privacy from no one else in London, he would have it from me. Nevertheless, I liked to keep track of where he was in his review.

“1923,” he snapped, still clearly grieved by his friend’s self-libel.

‘The Creeping Man,’ then. I was not familiar with it, but I had been given to understand that the post-war stories had been exceedingly dark.

“At the distance of thirty years, I think even Dr Watson may be allowed moments of doubt,” I reproved him.

He turned a glare on me. “And pray tell, whose side are you on?”

“My own,” I told him frankly. “You’re impossible to live with when you finally get around to rebuking yourself for having momentarily thought ill of Dr Watson. I’m merely trying to shorten the inevitable period of self-recrimination I’ll have to put up with later.”

He stared at me a moment, before a bark of laughter escaped him. “Then for your sake, Wt’sn—and not his!—I will overlook… _that.”_ He gestured at the book with an irritated flick of his fingers. He had been reduced to incoherency twice over, I noted: the passage, whatever it was, had upset him thoroughly. Fortunately, he showed the good sense to not return to his reading immediately, but set himself about other tasks.

“You’re good to put up with all this, Wt’sn,” he said, when a half-hour had passed.

“Stuff and nonsense. I’m the one who sent you on this wild goose chase. It would be a poor showing to complain about it now.”

“It hasn’t been entirely without reward,” he corrected me.

Rigellians are not a highly-strung race, nor inclined toward second-guessing ourselves, but I had still wondered if Holmes might have been happier never knowing about the despatch box. He didn’t speak of Dr Watson’s letters to me, and I had not known if he considered himself fortunate or cursed to have them.

“No,” I agreed. “Not entirely without reward.” I appreciated him having the goodness to say so.

 

It was not long after that exchange that Holmes reached the final page of Dr Watson’s volume. For some time it had been clear to us both that Holmes’ initial success would be his only one. ‘Musgrave Ritual’ had been written for Holmes’ eyes, but none of the others were. Holmes had nonetheless pushed to the end, but not in the hope of finding something; he finished it only to be sure there was nothing to be found.

“Well, then,” I said.

“Just so,” Holmes replied.

I felt as if there should be some sort of ceremony to mark his final closing of the _Complete Adventures._ Unfortunately, I could not imagine what might be appropriate. For want of a better idea, I poured Holmes a brandy, and myself one as well. “To your health.” There was little point in toasting Dr Watson’s, dead and dust for three hundred years.

“And yours. Although I admit I have no idea what John thought he was about, there at the last.” It was ‘John’ again, I noted, and I felt strangely honoured to be permitted that intimacy with Holmes, on this final occasion. “A jellyfish, really?” Holmes complained. “And the ape-man was frankly a disgrace, I might have been reading Shelley or Stoker.”

I had enjoyed the jellyfish story, albeit by proxy. Much to my amusement, Holmes had spent that afternoon muttering at the page, “look in the pool… the pool… oh, give over with the Bellamys already… _dash it, look in the pool!”_ before closing the book with a snap and storming off to relieve his feelings with some lightning bolts.

“If you didn’t like the jellyfish story, then you should have refrained from writing it,” I chided him. That Dr Watson had tried to pass the tale off as Holmes’ own work had stuck in his craw as much as anything.

“I shall take that under advisement,” he said gravely, and proceeded to regale me with what he claimed to be the true, and surprisingly racy version of what had happened at ‘Shoscombe Old Place.’

When I refreshed our glasses, Holmes raised his and pronounced, with all the gravitas of a Barrymore, _“Behold, the Lion’s Mane!”_

I thought it a fitting toast for the occasion. _“The Lion’s Mane!”_ I returned.

And that, I thought, was the end of it.

 

It had done him some good, I thought, in a roundabout sort of way, even though not the good I had intended. I had no occasion to observe whether, when lying half-dazed in an alleyway, he might still ask for Dr Watson—and I did not wish to conduct that trial—but I noted that when new time warp research was published, Holmes attended merely with keen interest, no longer holding the quivering, suspended tension of a pointer on alert. It seemed to me, too, that he no longer worked quite so hard to assure me that I was better than a meagre substitute for Dr Watson.

But the differences, if they existed, were small ones, and might have occurred only in my own mind.

 

And so we went on for two more years, him solving cases and I occasionally assisting him, until 2254 when he was pursuing what turned out to be a particularly distressing genemod case. He had been irritable during the investigation, as he often was when he thought he was missing something obvious: genemods, however mundane, fall within a technological scope that was still relatively new to him, and that newness slowed his progress. I find it a justifiable weakness in him, but he does not; it was little wonder that his mood was nearly impossible to bear during the case.

We had reached the end of it—or he had, I was still trying to keep the tragic object of our investigation alive long enough for emergency services to arrive—when I looked up to see that Holmes was grinning in a way that was positively indecent, given the catastrophe of the case’s resolution for all concerned.

 _“Holmes!”_ I hissed at him, scandalised. He attempted to compose himself, but the smile crept back. Even his niece, who shared some of his ways and was desensitised by her years of service with the Yard, seemed offended by Holmes’ demeanour. Our disapproval could not quell him, however. Ultimately, there was nothing for it but to make our excuses and leave, as quickly as we were able.

“Holmes, what the deuce has gotten into you?” I demanded, as we departed the scene.

“Patience, Doctor,” he told me, grinning madly now that there was no one but me to see. “Patience, and all shall be well.”

When we reached our rooms, he went straight to my old copy of the _Complete Adventures._ It only took a few moments for him to find the page he wanted, at which point he triumphantly reversed the volume and thrust it at me.

The illustration showed an elderly gentleman clinging by one arm to an ivy-covered wall, three stories above the ground, precisely as we had seen our tragic genemod addict several hours before.

“Behold the Creeping Man!” he cried.

I took the book from him. “Holmes, you’re not suggesting…?”

“I insist you read it, Wt’sn.” He riffled several pages back until I was at the story’s beginning, then manhandled me into my chair.

I had read not more than a page, when I looked up in confusion. “Holmes—”

“No, that will not do,” he commanded, “Do not spare yourself a single appalling, egregious, execrable word! Read!”

I indulged him, and read. When I finished, I looked up at him in wonder.

He beamed at me. “The match is exact, is it not?”

“Down to the name of the dog,” I agreed.

“Down to the name of the dog!” he crowed.

“And you think this is by your agency?”

“I know it’s by my agency! There are details in there that not even you know, and if you’ll forgive me the subterfuge, I plan on telling them to no one but John Watson himself. Nineteen-hundred and twenty-three!” he shouted. “Oh, and mark that, his likening himself to my cocaine! Decidedly _not_ a distortion of his memory after an absence of thirty years.” He thumped the page for emphasis. “The very self-same story! Oh, John Watson and I will have _words._ ” He rubbed his hands together in relish.

I couldn’t help but laugh at him. “Spare me your domestic squabbles with the man, if you please. He won’t even have written this by the time you see him next.”

“Quite right, quite right. Come, find a pencil, you must help me work out the dates,” he instructed, retrieving the volume from me.

I fetched my journal and stylus, and dialled up a calendar as well, expecting we would need it. “You’ll never now convince me that the jellyfish story wasn’t yours, you know,” I warned him.

“Waste your time searching it for evidence of my authorship, if you wish.”

I harrumphed. Perhaps I would someday.

“John Watson is to be pitied, you know,” Holmes said, after we had been working for a while.

“Thinking he’s settling in to a peaceful retirement, and having you drop into his lap? I should say so.”

Holmes laughed, delighted at the prospect of it. “That, of course, yes. But more significantly, the poor man is destined to live out the remainder of his days in the shadow of a Rigellian.”

There was a gravity to his tone that compelled me to look up. Holmes’ eyes were glowing with affection. For a moment, I was too overcome to speak.

“Yes, well,” I said, when I had composed myself again. “Not everyone can be Rigellian. But I trust you’ll ensure he does not feel his deficiencies too much.”

Holmes smiled, already halfway to 1923. “I will do my very best, you can be sure.” 

And with that, we settled in to making sense of Dr Watson’s dates.

 

**Author's Note:**

> For those who would enjoy it, [a tour of the ACD canon references](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/166336549693/possibility221-said-they-would-enjoy-a) in "Handsome and Generous," at my tumblr.


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